Christian Science Monitor reporter Teresa Méndez takes a look at “peer-to-peer book review” websites like Goodreads.com and LibraryThing. Such sites are starting to attract attention from the major publishers—but not as markets on which to test new product. “We’re not necessarily looking for them to reinforce what we already know—which is that the book is great,” Random House marketer Avideh Bashirrad told Mendez. “We’re hoping they’ll help us generate early word-of-mouth buzz for these books.” In other words, they want to take sites where people were ostensibly supposed to gather together for spontaneous sharing of their literary passions and plant little seeds of desire.
Will handing out free ARCs of Away to LibraryThing members build enough buzz to transform Amy Bloom, so that Random can shift from emphasizing her “devoted readership and wide critical acclaim” (translation: “one of our best midlisters”) and comfortably identify her as a “bestselling” author? We’ll see.* On the surface, the Random/LibraryThing venture sounds like a slightly lower-key approach than the breathless offers of autographed galleys other publishers have tried in the past, but the strategy is still a work in progress.
*…and I think we’re allowed to suspend the pretense of objectivity briefly enough to say it would be nice, and that we wouldn’t mind seeing Away ourselves.